It promised, in 1870, that the vote could not be denied because of race. Then for almost a hundred years, that promise was broken, until a movement forced the nation to finally keep it.
The Fifteenth Amendment, ratified in 1870, declared that the right to vote shall not be denied or abridged on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude. It was the last of the three Reconstruction amendments passed after the Civil War.
Its promise was sweeping. For the first time, the Constitution barred racial discrimination in voting, opening the ballot, in principle, to Black men across the nation, including the millions just freed from slavery.
Then it was gutted in practice. Southern states spent the next decades evading it through poll taxes, literacy tests, grandfather clauses, and outright violence, devices carefully designed to disenfranchise Black citizens without openly mentioning race, the thing the amendment forbade.
It took nearly a century to enforce. The promise of 1870 became real only with the Voting Rights Act of 1965, passed after the bloodshed at Selma, which finally gave the federal government the tools to strike down the evasions and protect the vote the amendment had guaranteed.
